[anticristi]

Thinking out loud: When I read the BGP spec, I got the feeling that it was optimized for reduced churn. As the Internet routing table size increased and increase in CPU power of routers was an uncertainty, the architects of the Internet wanted to avoid extra BGP exchanges.

However, now it seems like the Internet is facing new challenges and a different trade-off might make sense. Why not add a "valid until" attribute on each route? The originating router would have to re-announce a new route every 24 hours. Failure to propagate the update at any point would automatically withdraw it. Of course, re-announcing 1M routes every day might be a lot, but at this point it feels worth considering.

[jlmcguire]

I think 24 hours would be too slim. BGP is "routing by rumor" across a lot of AS's. I think a week would be more interesting allowing for route propagation to be a little slower. Obv this requires the spec really changing which in the case of BGP is unlikely to happen other than little tweaks